Hello all,
As the pandemic has wound down, or perhaps merely gone dormant for a spell, It's been fun to watch how travelers reacted. Not surprisingly, a lot of us bolted for the front door at the first opportunity. I surprised even myself after two years of near hermitlike isolation, by busting out with a near month-long trip to Ireland last spring.
But when it comes to novel approaches, I take a back seat and tip my hat to to the travelers featured in our lead Travel story this week: You keep thinking there's a punchline coming, because the whole situation sounds like the set-up for a joke: Did you hear the one about the tourists who went to Russia during Putin's "special military operation"? But no, as Allison Quinn makes perfectly clear in the delightfully droll The Tourists Who Thought Now Is a GREAT Time to Visit Russia, there are a sizeable number of people in the United States and elsewhere in the West who for a variety of reasons decided that now is as good a time as any to go to Russia. Hey, you can't use a Western credit card right now, but think of the time you'll save in lines at the airport.
In Want to See a Jaguar? Look Beyond One of the World's Most Famous Pyramids, Isabella Rolz and Jorge Rodriquez propose a slightly more sensible trip: visit the Jaguar Temple at Tikal in Guatamala's Petén region, but don't just visit this extraordinary pyramid. Instead, try one of several tours that take you hiking through the surrounding jungle. Some resorts cater to eco-tourism with package tours that take you deep into untrammeled territory, or you can rough it like an archeologist. Between ancient Mayan culture and the bounty of the natural world, there's plenty to see beyond the Jaguar Temple.
For a simply fascinating slice of history, dive into Elizabeth Warkentin's The Tragedy That Made This Glitzy Swiss Village Famous, which is really a story about the Matterhorn, which we all know about, but, as Warkentin asks, why do we know this mountain out of all the other Alps?
And for an exhaustive but not exhausting catalog of all there is to do with spooks and voodoo in America's scariest city, New Orleans, consult Thuc Nguyen's thorough, and thoroughly amusing, How to Do Halloween Right in America's Most Haunted City.
–Malcolm Jones, Books Editor
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